A new story with an old name. A sister grieves when a boy named Clarence mysteriously brings death on those around him, challenging the most basic ideas of her not so far in the future world. Inspired by the feel of Philip K. Dick's prose.

Few
things are more tragic in the eyes of the universe than the death of
a baby. After all the energy expended to create what we know as life,
the cessation of that life before it can produce autonomously is a
sadness recognizable by every consciousness. And who can say why it
should happen?

His
name was Clarence. They could not explain him. They could explain
everything else—the exact biological mechanisms that created the
colors of his chocolate-milkshake skin and big round distant black
eyes, the shapes of his disfigured hands and Dizzy Gillespie cheeks.
They could explain the mental mechanisms that drove his parents to
the chemical streets, and possibly to their separate suicides (though
the cause of death could not be determined with certainty in either
case), and those that naturally caused the rest of us to attribute
all the ruin around that child to everything but the child himself.
But they could not explain his life, which not only produced nothing,
but destroyed so much.

They
explain it to us like some endless cycle of energy exchange. You
know, that's what they teach us in school, something like that—it's
been so many years, and me, I was never good at science. I guess
that's why I never finished school, since it pervades everything.
But the way I remember it is life is like a shortcut or something,
like living organisms are some kind of repositories for the energy it
takes to process the universe. We're shortcuts for whatever is
running this show, so it can see through our eyes and, I guess,
doesn't have to look for itself. What I
always thought about it was if that was true then whatever is
running the show probably has to be some kind of shortcut for
something else even bigger, but that's not important. At least, I
don't think that's important. With Clarence, you never did know
and you never do. But it's all this junk that makes it so hard to
make any sense out of him. They teach us all this meaning of life and
it sounds so easy, compact, commonsense, but what we don't realize
until that ultimate tragedy occurs is that it occludes the meaning of
death.

Clarence
was not my sister's child, but she was the one who lasted the
longest with him. You'd never expect that, when you knew that
everywhere Clarence went, death followed. You wouldn't, because my
sister had always been frail in some sense—she functioned properly
but her every pore emitted an unmistakable weakness, from her first
day to her last. The only way I can explain it is she had lived her
whole twenty-seven years on the cusp of life and death, and so when
Clarence tried—not that the child had any will or say in the
matter, I mean—to push her over the line, she was so good at
walking that tightrope that she held on when anyone used to the
comforts of liveliness would have been caught off guard and fallen
over straightaway. In any case, she was the most caring and gentle
soul you could ever meet, and she took that child under her thin but
expansive wing for nigh on a year, until…

Well,
when it happened, of course, they explained it to us. That's what
they do. That's what we all do, I think, when something happens
that shakes us to the core, is we try to explain it so we can say,
this is how it happened, and we pretend that's the same as why it
happened and we can go on believing as we did before. They told us
maybe it was a sickness, you know, a virus or a contagion or what
have you, I told you I'm no good at science and I haven't got a
memory for it. He carried it, probably from his parents—probably,
because if it was a sickness, it was one so potent that it would be
dangerous to keep the boy around long enough to operate on his body
and find out what it was, they said. But they took his body and we
haven't seen it since, so what I think is that they did all
that—with machines, of course, it's not like they use human
beings for that type of work anymore—and they just couldn't find
anything wrong with him that would cause all the things to happen
that so obviously did. They told us it could be something passed on
from his mother, which was plausible since she lived in a world of
chemical disfigurement and ever-mutating venereal pestilence, signs
of which were already plastered immutably on his withered little
fingers. Obviously you can't just pass on something in your genes
by breathing the same air as another person, but you know how you can
be born a carrier of something awful, even get something non-genetic
during birth, and you have no idea you can infect someone else until
everyone around you starts getting sick. I've heard that can happen
sometimes.

Anyway
my sister took care of that boy like he was her own, and like most of
us round here she didn't have a man stick around to help her but to
her it didn't make any difference. And just like how her weakness
must've made her able to weather whatever it is that killed
everyone before her, it was that stigma of weakness she carried all
her life that galvanized her to be the strength for baby Clarence,
and perhaps that's my salvation for having hated her for that
weakness so long. It's like maybe she was saving up all that energy
for those final moments. Like a long-distance runner, only this was
her life, not some foot-race.

Looking
back on it all, I think my sister knew about Clarence the way my
mother knew. I never was allowed to see him, and that was before my
mother said never to bring him to our house again. I thought at the
time it was just because she didn't want me in her boy's life
after all the hard feelings between the two of us, didn't need me
to decide he wasn't strong enough the way I had decided she wasn't.
But she knew his mom and pops (how is anyone's guess, their whole
lives revolved around the chemicals, but she didn't touch the
stuff) and if she was the one who ended up with the baby then she
must've seen what happened to them, how they just faded away. And
that's how everyone round here describes it. They withered away,
the talk goes, withered like Clarence's little fingers had done in
that poor accursed womb. And they weren't the only ones—my sister
wasn't the first to try to take the boy in after his parents died.
She watched the same thing happen to the next couple, whose lives and
minds weren't quite so immersed in the drugs, and who were still
together even into death, just like she and Clarence would be. She
watched the cousins, infant playmates, fall while Clarence took his
first steps. She could have seen it a hundred times over for all I
know, but only after all that did she take him in herself. She must
have known that she was putting herself in the line of fire of
something she knew nothing about. Unless she, too, believed it was
the drugs.

That's
what they suggested when it was all over. Tried to pin some new
concoction on the streets as the culprit in all the deaths we knew
were connected to Clarence. And I'd have thought the same, you
know, and maybe my sister did too and that's why she took Clarence
even after everyone else rotted from the inside out. But once the
same happened to my sister—and the child in her care!—that whole
theory should have been tossed out with yesterday's news reel. She
was clean,
despite the best efforts of her no-good "friends." It's what
she always told us, even the day we all got suspicious of some marks
inside her arm looked like needle pricks. Sure, she was mad, but
you'd expect that of anyone wrongly accused, as I tell anybody who
tries to say that it proves a damn thing. Turns out she was using a
real manual fireplace for the first time (the only time) in her life
and she'd poked herself with some of the tools. Burns, not pricks.
Anyway she was clean and it was no drug that did her or Clarence or
any of 'em in. Besides, if it was, why aren't people still dying?
You know, they act like they have all the answers, but they sure
never gave me one for that. And when she died with him that night on
a park bench in the city, I never got one then either. A whole lot of
maybe-hows but not a single why.

Early
deaths are always framed as mistakes. Like somehow the universe, or
whatever is controlling it, just dropped the ball for a moment.
Random error. You can't explain random error; it's the overall
mechanism you have to look at, they'll tell you. You watch the way
most people live long and die predictably and in between learn much
and produce much, all in accordance with the preponderant idea of how
these things work, and you disregard the few who do not when you
calculate why it all happens. It's all very methodical—everything
operates by a few simple rules, and everything not explained by those
rules…well, it's random. Inexplicable, but expected. The way I
see it, though, you can either explain it or you can't, none of
this having it both ways.

If
Clarence's life served any purpose at all, it was to tell everybody
to stop trying to find meaning where there isn't any. Trouble with
that is then you have a meaningful event saying events aren't
meaningful, that there aren't any rules in this game, that energy
can be used to simply extinguish other energies for no
reason at all.
And the funny thing about that is it's so damn sad
that you suddenly see why whoever's running this show wouldn't
want to see the whole thing himself. But that theory's already
false by then, because if he were actually using us to see it for him
then that would mean he's got a purpose, got a rule. And it's all
that kind of junk that makes it so hard to make any sense out of
Clarence, so you're just left with the same question: Why?

Well
who can say?

They
never could explain it, except to say that it was tragic. And there
never really was any doubt about that.

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